Survival... Spring flowers!

After several years, my Carol Mackie Daphne has flowered! I'm really surprised since it's been moved at least 4 times in as many years. Two of those years living in a pot.

The bleeding hearts (dicentra) also are blooming, after 2 years in small pots. Think what they could do in the ground!

If I only had two pots for spring plants, those are the ones I would choose, Darius. May I be nosy and inquire how many pots you are quartering your treasures in?

We've been thinking about moving for a long time - but ambivalently - as you might have gathered from my email to you yesterday. I would need hundreds of pots. Do you have any advice for people in my situation about managing a horticultural "Noah's Ark" in our situation?

In spite of all the crime (mostly in the past thank Flora) and our increasing creakiness, I hate to give up our perch - this may not be the Rockies (see my post in the Weather Forum), but our front windows do look out into sky through the skrim of old pines and apple trees, and sunsets from the back of the garden farther up the hill are glorious.

Plus we are as poor as the day we bought our charming hovel for $13,000 thirty years ago. Plus, we don't have another 30 years to live to see cuttings and seedlings mature to the point that they have in this garden. But, it doesn't hurt to plan and be ready for contingencies.

So, I hope you and others will advise away. In the quandary we are in, I don't think we can be given too much advice.

bluespiral, why do you want to move? That reason can be all the difference. I would move to the country, but not within the city, for example.
The best plant move I ever saw involved owning both homes one summer. Another one moved plants to friends' yards and retreived them later, but there were a LOT of yards involved and some of the "sitters" didn't want to give the plants back. Dividing helped.

Karen, I had well over a hundred plants in pots (from one quart to 10 gallon sizes) when I moved from Asheville in February a year ago. Many were then planted in the ground at my aunt's summer house for later retrival (I hope!) and a few here in the ground last fall. I still have about 30-40 in pots. Heaps of a mulch covering in a sheltered spot for the winter helped most of them survive. Summer required more shade (even for non-shade plants) and copious watering.

I am pleased to see my pots of trilliums survived. They aren't up enough to bloom yet, excepting the yellow one which should bloom soon. Here's a photo of it last spring...

I cannot imagine living in the same place for 30 years, LOL. I've moved more than a dog trying to get away from fleas. However, I long to stay in a place more than 5 years and have a decent garden again. Won't be anytime soon. Sigh.

I'm a bit ambivalent about moving, too. But I must. Cannot make ends meet here by myself, and the mold plus the oily vapor from the heater is killing my lungs.

Sylvi, my reasons to move are:

Everything we bring into the house, including ourselves, has to be lugged about 30 steps up the hill to the house. I have 2 degenerative diseases of the spine, so the writing is on the wall, so to speak. DH has had to have back surgery, and we are both aging.

The neighbor who broke into my house and attempted a rape in 1988 is out of jail and hangs out in this area from time to time. He has a long history of drugs, rape and assault. If I thought he were likely to stay off drugs I might be less concerned about the situation. (My life was no picnic before moving here, and I don't want to be run off by crime.)

It's legal to ride a dirt bike on private property in Maryland, and our neighbors' dirt bikes make our garden and home uninhabitable when they are are doing this. They have not responded to gentle pleas nor police visits, and I am told that our only avenue at this time is to get up a public petition to the effect that they are a public nuisance, and I am not willing to go from door to door to do this.

Real estate values have skyrocketed in this area. The tininess of our house makes it difficult for DH to pursue his sculpture and me to pursue music (after 2 years, have healed enough to start up again). So, it might be possible to "trade" for something larger.

The pros are:

In spite of great adversity, crime and lack of time and money, we made a garden that is as close to heaven on earth as I can imagine, when the dirt bikes are not running. It's especially hard to give something up when it was so hard to create and when you don't have physical capability to make anything like it again. When you look out from the garden up the hill, you see sky surrounded by woods and hills - an illusion fostered by the boundary plantings.

As an army brat, what a revelation it has been to stay put long enough to make the friends we have. Very unusual people seem to gravitate to this community and then, across the river from E.C., there are others whose families were linked to the mill and the Ellicott brothers before that - they have points of view and perspectives right out of those Foxfire books. Some of my neighbors are either professional or amateur musicians with whom I played chamber music informally before tendinitis struck. It's improved a lot and I'm looking forward to just walking up the street again and playing Mozart under Stu and Peg's sycamore tree.

We still have to work in retirement, and our location is convenient to jobs in the area, as well as to universities and trails.

I'll probably think of other factors after I post this, but this is what comes to mind, now.

Darius, I think this is what is known as "hijacking" at DG. This thread started out as something light and lovely, and now I'm taking it into a darker dimension. I apologize and will stop. Let me know.

Nah, not a problem! Threads get hijacked all the time and that usually ends up bringing many of us closer...

Wow. You have really good reasons for moving AND really good reasons for staying. No wonder this is a hard choice for you.
I think I would have to move, based on two of the things you said. One: you don't sound totally safe in that location, although I understand not wanting to be run off. Two: you have a lot of climbing it seems. I bet your place is beautiful. But, and I hope I am not being too forward here, it is better to move while you are able. My beloved grandmother would not leave her home in West Virginia until she was too frail to make the trip to Michigan to live with us, and had to move into a care facility. It was very hard caring for her from six hours away.
I hope I haven't stuck my big nose too far into your business!
Darius, I too have plants that have lived in pots for several years--and I haven't moved! Is there an expression like "My eyes were bigger than my stomach" for gardening? My brain runs faster than my shovel, perhaps?

Which witch was it that said something like "Our noses are in the best place right where they are?" Was it in the Wizard of Oz? No offense taken - I appreciate your response Sylvi. This is an emotional situation for us and outside opinions either help by keeping our thinking processes centered and more objective or by making us think harder about what we are or are not about to do.

This may also be true of your potted plants, you two. There are such epicurean connoisseurs among our wildlife that I don't think I could grow trillium anywhere else than in a pot. It's come to that for bulbs like crocuses and even daffodils.

Actually, we have never, in all our decades of the "stopping-and-gawking" variety of hiking seen one single trillium in the wild. Deer? DNR not being able to spell "habitat"?

Which brings me back to the subject - some delicate woodland beauties are just beginning to bloom along nearby trails - rue anemone (one patch), spring beauty (most pervasive), liverwort (hepatica - 1 plant), and bloodroot (very sparse). Farming and quarrying and logging have come and gone and these flowers still return with every Spring - keeps things in perspective for us.

I never saw a trillium in the wild when I lived in MD either and hiked a lot, even inrto W. MD and W. VA. The mountains here are full of them, although mine are cultivated, not wildlings.